Allies Like These

With news emerging of widespread US spying on several dozen European leaders and populations, we see the rise of the national –no, international security state.

Spy craft has long been a tool of states, especially between rivals and enemy nations.

But with the release of the Snowden files (snatched and released by former CIA and NSA security analyst, Edward Snowden), we learn that the US considers spying on allies of equal, or even greater importance.

Not since the shady days of ex-president Richard Nixon, who was infamous for his wiretaps of American dissidents (like the Peace Movement, the Black Freedom Movement and the American Indian Rights Movement), have we seen spying on such a vast scale.

Indeed, the Bush administration, which had Nixonian appetites, especially in their total information awareness campaign, had to reduce the range of their domestic snooping when civil libertarians yelled and screamed.

Fast forward half a dozen years, and total information awareness seems like and understatement.

Under President Barack Obama, national security has been unleashed, to include domestic spying on millions of Americans, and on millions of Europeans in so-called ‘Allied” countries. Leaders of France, Germany, Brazil and Britain have had their personal communications hacked and wirelessly tapped, by American Intelligence.

Are Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Francois Holiande, and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff suspected of conspiring with Al Qaeda? Seriously?

An empire has no allies. It has subordinates. Satraps. Tools. Nothing more.

An empire is subject to no law, other than its own will.

All it knows is expansion. More – of everything.

Boy, that sounds perfectly American to me!